Stunning recent pictures of the Elwha River valley on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where the world’s largest dam removal project is currently under way, show the beginnings of nature’s reclamation of a landscape altered vastly a century ago to power industrialization. The Elwha’s transformation, unthinkable two decades ago, in some ways mirrors that of public perceptions in the Pacific Northwest towards managing and protecting natural resources. Nothing has driven the removal of the dams, and the broader evolution of views on the environment, more than salmon.
The precipitous decline in the Pacific Northwest’s legendary salmon runs during the past three decades, and subsequent placement of several salmon species native to local waterways on the endangered species list, has had far-reaching impacts. When salmon in Puget Sound, the Columbia River and other regional waterways were placed on the endangered species list, virtually every stream, lake, and tributary draining into them—along with all the communities and farms they course through—became subject to the rules of the Endangered Species Act. The removal of the Elwha dams may be the most visible manifestation to date of this, but the ripple effects have permeated the way people live, work, and think about the environment and sustainability. Among other examples, virtually any project involving land development in the Puget Sound region, home to more than 4 million people and a center of the U.S. aerospace, information technology, and healthcare technology industries, now must factor in the potential direct and indirect impacts to salmon habitat.
Salmon are well-known for their complex life cycle. And indeed, the history, science and politics of salmon in the Pacific Northwest already fill volumes, reflecting the immense complexity of factors and diverse range of actors involved. Managing this complexity—and the sometimes Byzantine and overlapping array of federal, tribal, state, county, city, port, and international regulations and authorities involved—is a significant challenge to building public support and buy-in for efforts to save salmon when costs, private property, and livelihoods are involved. This is not unlike the challenges faced in other sustainability initiatives and efforts to deploy renewable energy technologies, for example. For this reason, successful mechanisms for managing the complexity of restoring a sustainable salmon ecosystem could offer models for managing other complex systems.
In a previous post I wrote about the Kitakyushu Initiative for a Clean Environment and the lessons learned from the Indonesian city of Surabaya’s successful waste management campaign that reduced waste generation by more than 20 percent over a four-year period. One of the key factors in Surabaya’s success was the mobilization of local women’s organizations and community NGOs that promoted these efforts at the ground-level. Similar things are at work in restoring the salmon ecosystem in the Puget Sound region. While a plethora of state and federal agencies and organizations work to manage and coordinate these efforts at a macro-level, there are natural limits to what they can do and which roles they can most appropriately play. Local citizens and NGOs have a critical part to play in addressing micro-level issues other stakeholders are not equipped to handle, and—importantly—in managing up to bridge the gap between decision makers, the facts on the ground, and the people whose actions make a difference. In a follow-up post, I will explore the activities of one local organization in Puget Sound working to do this, and consider how lessons from its experiences may be applicable to other sustainability initiatives.
